Oddbean new post about login | logout So what’s the deal with trigger warnings? Do they actually help? They clear are a culture war fixture. But where do they come from and is there any scientific evidence behind them? Because they first got public attention at liberal arts universities in the US I assumed that it was the popularization of academic research. That’s not actually what happened. It was students who pressured schools to adopt them. Where did the students learn about trigger warnings? Early social media! LiveJournal, Tumblr, and most especially fanfic sites had trigger and content warnings on their content and lots of students had used those sites in high school and liked the idea of trigger warnings. Search Engine is a great podcast, and they did an episode about the origins of trigger warnings. https://www.searchengine.show/listen/search-engine-1/what-do-trigger-warnings-actually-do
I thought it was a lot older than that? Like clicking your fingers instead of clapping, I thought it was a 60s campus thing in the US and talk around PTSD. Which later got adopted by the world cos we're just on a cultural time lag. Like a lot of things it probably started with good intentions and for genuine needs. Maybe it's more about specifically online, as we know it now? Not listened to the podcast, but I also blame Tumblr for almost everything.
So is the reason mostly unbothered by culture war stuff (other than thinking it’s mostly bollox) because I never had a Tumblr account? Also, did they start the whole missing vowel trend? Bastards.
I often think about that slatestarcodex dude's essay, Right is the new left. It's obviously quite reductionist if I remember correctly, but probably acknowledged that. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
The rich art school kids pretending to be poor, grew up, got jobs in culutual, academic and political industries and started bringing their (often retro) online protest politics and Tumblr cultural to their new jobs. Once slightly fringe, and niche interests, language and concepts were then pushed into mainstream. Queer used to be some sort of fringe too, now it sort of just means you shop at retro second hand shops. Queer has become generic pop culture now, which is sort of funny. Perhaps it was heavily posturing to begin with and this is the logical conclusion. It wasn't that long ago that no one knew what cis, diaspora, intersectional blah blah even meant. Now it's sort of everywhere, which was the goal. But it also induces an internal eye rolling. You daren't roll your eyes publicly tho, cos those rich Tumblr kids are also in charge of the HR department. So you have to play along lol. It is really worth losing your job over? Type beat.
I always thought trigger warnings came from tumblr, one of a number of ideas cooked up by teenagers trying to reinvent existing things from scratch. It's just content warnings, which have obviously been around a lot longer, but framed around trauma triggers. So like, making something that's useful for everyone out to be an accessibility tool, which opens it up to a bunch of criticism and debate that was never applicable before. It would never have been a "culture war" issue if those kids hadn't needlessly rebranded and moralized the basic act of warning about possibly objectionable material.
Interesting, added to listen list. (adding @fountain_app link so it picks it up, though it would be nice if it understood show pages somehow) https://fountain.fm/episode/DRf0gvqNkiAmQpjAM4ze
Search Engine was a fantastic podcast... Going down multiple rabbitholes. Too bad it got shut down due to social backlash 🥲
Search Engine is an active running podcast. I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
I'm sorry. I mistook Search Engine for Reply All which was also a podcast by PJ Vogt and produced by Sruthi Pinnamaneni...
I read that they can't even use 'trigger warning' anymore, as it triggers their weak minds, they use another warning, can't remember what it was.
“Content warning”, and there is a mass of data showing that they are at best useless and at worst counterproductive.
Yes, I've never understood it. Not to be insensitive, but, life is hard. If you want to be an adult, you have to face some hard things. If you want to challenge yourself intellectually, at uni for example, you will have to face some hard truths, shocking history, terrible actions, but that is how you grow. Strength and resilience comes from facing these challenges and coming out the other side a good person, knowing that life is tough and unfair, but not letting that weigh you down.
isn´t the trigger warning itself a trigger?
The trigger warning is an instruction telling you how you should feel about what you are about to see. It is a command.